Postmortem: Lionhead Studios' Black & White

1. It
got finished. This sounds stupid, but we encountered some big problems,
and there were times when we doubted that the game (as it ultimately ended
up) would get released. As a new company, we not only had to work out
the game we were going to create, but we had to write the tools and libraries,
create everything from scratch in software, and also gel together as a
team.

We couldn't
have a dress rehearsal for this, so we learned by trying things and then
changing them if they didn't work. As time rolled on, we couldn't afford
to make any mistakes or pursue blind alleys. For example, we talked about
updating some of the graphics at one point. It didn't seem a big job,
but once we'd changed some of the buildings in the tribal villages, they
showed up any unchanged ones and made them look less impressive, so we
had to assign time to do them all. We got a much better set of buildings
out of this, but if we'd known that we'd have had to do all of them, we
would have said, rightly, that there wasn't time.

The programmers
were likewise coming up with neater and neater ways of coding, and thus
trying to do more and more with the code they had. It says a lot about
the talented and single-minded development team at Lionhead that everybody
always wanted to make every element that little bit better.

And as we
fixed the bugs and sent the game to QA, we felt like people who'd run
a marathon and could see the finish line, but it didn't seem to be getting
any closer. Perhaps this is a function of not getting enough sleep over
a period of several months.

2. All
the risks paid off. We wanted to do some pretty groundbreaking things
in Black & White. One example was doing away with the panel
of controls and using the Gesture system for casting Miracles. We tried
and tried to get this feeling just right, and if we'd had to dump it,
I'd have been so disappointed. But after research, testing, and simple
trial and error we got it working beautifully, and we now have a feature
no one else does.

Also, integrating
the story line into such a free-flowing strategy game was a risk. We thought
it would sit quietly behind the game, popping up to direct you if you
hadn't moved on, but the story came alive and started to draw the player
through the game in a way none of us, apart from perhaps scriptwriter
James Leach, had envisaged. It also gave us characters such as Sable,
the Creature trainer, and those advisors whom we hear people now quoting
lines from, and who exist outside the game as recognizable characters.

The huge,
learning, intelligent Creature was also more of a gamble than he now seems.
To go into AI in such an in-depth way required Richard Evans, our AI programmer,
to consider what learning was, how practice works, and how the reinforcement
of ideas comes about. Then he built all this into a character which appeared
to live and learn like, say, a clever puppy. AI is always a minefield,
and I'm always disappointed by great strategy games which appear to have
the most simple, easy-to-predict AI running your enemies. We just wanted
to advance the technology to its extreme.

Creature comforts.

We also
wanted to do more with graphics and animation blending. The world changes
depending on whether you're playing as a good or an evil god, and things
take on subtle new looks. The Creature, the player's hand, and many of
the buildings change, and we used more animation blending to achieve smooth
movement and changes than anyone else has ever done, I believe.

We're also
the first game (apart from Microsoft's Flight Simulator) which
enables you to import real weather in real time into the world. We are
also the first to enable unified messaging, whereby you can send messages
to the web from the game, or receive them, using e-mail and mobile phones.
This integrated two-way messaging as well as the ability to take your
Creature out of Black & White and onto the web is brand-new.
Also, the game can import names from your e-mail package and assign them
to unique villagers in your tribe in the game. I expect lots of games
to do similar things in the future, but we took massive risks and devoted
huge amounts of effort to being the first and to making it work properly.

3. The
game looks so stunning. When we started, we used a wireframe test
bed and a couple of conceptual screenshots to provide some atmosphere.
I first showed the test bed and these mocked-up screenshots to the press
at E3 in Atlanta in 1998, and I could see on the assembled faces that
nobody believed we could accomplish anything like it in the final game.
I was complimented on the depth and beauty of preliminary efforts, but
the compliments had a slightly hollow ring. I could almost hear people
thinking, "Yeah, it looks great, but anyone can draw pretty screens
using an art package. What's your game really going to look like?"

Concept art featuring Horny from Dungeon Keeper—a great
deal to live up to.

Not only
did we manage to pull off the look we wanted, but we exceeded it by some
margin. The sheer beauty of the lands is something I hope won't be matched
for a while, and the fact that you can move, zoom, and rotate to view
it from any angle, anywhere in the game, is again something we got spot-on.

Looking
back, I don't know whether we were insanely ambitious, because at the
time we started, you couldn't have done what we did. We needed so much
custom-written software, and we also needed the minimum specification
of the PC community at large to get better before this would be viable.
When we started Black & White, most people had 32MB of RAM
in their PCs. The game requires 64MB, but that's commonplace now. So,
if you like, we aimed beyond the horizon, and the world rotated and caught
up with us so we still hit our target.

I still
have those original screenshots, and I still like looking at them. We
wrote a book called The Making of Black & White, and
from reading that, it's clear that we went from a bunch of bizarre ideas
linked by the concept of supreme control to the best game I have ever
seen.

The final product.

4. The
artificial intelligence. The Creature AI, as I have mentioned, is
absolutely spot-on. Richard Evans worked tirelessly on this, and it became
something that surprised even him with its flexibility and power. The
AI isn't just restricted to the Creature. Every villager in the game has
it as well, and they are all different in their wishes, desires, motivation,
and personality. Because there is no upper limit to the number of villagers
you can have, we had to cap the AI slightly by giving some of the villager
control to the Village Center, which acts like a hive and farms out some
of the cooperative elements to the people. We couldn't have them interrogating
each other, so this central control means that they do work as a unit
but can retain their individual characteristics. This makes the game much
faster and still gives them minds of their own.

The Creature
himself is an astonishing piece of work. Once he starts learning, he forms
his own personality as he goes, and no two players will ever have the
same Creature. The complexity is kept to a minimum to keep him fast, but
we managed to steer completely clear of using random elements to make
him seem like he has a mind of his own. And there is nothing in the game
that you can do which you can't teach your Creature to do. It's true to
say that the Creature mirrors you and your actions, so in Black &
White we've got a game in which part of the game itself learns from
everything you do and tailors itself to you.

5. The
way the team came together to make Black & White happen.
This is Lionhead Studios' first project, and everything started from scratch.
The people, the software, and the working environment were all new. Although
this was exactly what we needed to do a game so fresh and diverse, it
also created problems which I was delighted to overcome. The lack of any
precedent meant that things took a lot longer than they should have, and
the open-ended nature of the game throughout much of its development meant
that team members were limited only by their own imagination.

But the
nice thing is, every member of the Lionhead team gelled brilliantly, and
although I know we picked the very best people, there is an element of
luck in whether they can all work together so well. We certainly lucked
out with the team, and every one of them contributed massively to making
the game what it is.

The last
few months of the project were the hardest any of us has ever had to work,
but thanks to the people, they were also some of the most fun months we
ever had. If nothing else, we'll always remember the time we spent closeted
together making Black & White.

And I'll
never forget that without the right team, this game never would have happened.
It's as simple as that.